Not all places are like that. A friend of mine put if very nicely the other day. He said he spent a long time wondering if IT was for him. It seemed really destructive to his life. He came to the conclusion that IT was great. His specific job was not. He started to look for the job he wanted.

Another wise person once said, "Not everybody needs to be a programmer". You could be a waiter, for instance (not me -- that job is waaay too hard). After 20 years, I took "a year off" to teach English in Japan. I was working 35-40 hours a day. It seemed like part time. I enjoyed my life, got married and even wrote open source software. It was Idyllic. After 5 years of my "year off" (long after I thought I would never return to IT), I suddenly came back. I'm in a great team, working 40 hours a week and having a blast. We're a bit of a crazy team and are extreme, even for extreme programmers. I don't have a huge amount of time at work to write open source software, but I don't work stupid hours and my boss recognizes the value of giving me time to work on my own projects.

Sometimes it is easy to get trapped in the box thinking that there is only one way forward. Programmers are problem solvers. I don't know exactly what the solution to your problem is, but I feel certain that you can find it if you are creative enough. Don't give up!

I have had similar experiences with pre-hypertension and having no real success lowering my blood pressure -- except with the DASH diet. Like you, after a fairly short time with DASH, my blood pressure became normal. However, if you read the studies behind DASH (rather than the pamphlet on the website) you will find that the diet is geared around the hypothesis that increasing potassium and magnesium is the mechanism for lowering blood pressure. The sodium reduction is just kind of stapled on. The original paper shows that the DASH diet tended to reduce blood pressure at all sodium levels (although it appeared to reduce it more with lower sodium intake). Unfortunately, I couldn't tell from the paper what sample sizes they were using and I have grown cautious about the statistical abilities of nutritional researchers. The published DASH pamphlet is also faulty (IMHO) as it does not follow the diet used in the studies. It has a *much* higher calcium intake. I suspect (but have no evidence to support my feeling) that the published pamphlet has been prepared with "input" from various special interest groups.

The original DASH paper is available here: http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/1...

There a some other papers available on the internet as well. I would read these and ignore the various other websites/books with information about DASH.

Your view is common. I held it myself for a long time. I have since changed my mind. The real problem is that programming is taught very badly pretty much everywhere.

I spent 20 years as a programmer and then taught English as a foreign language for 5 years. I am now back programming, but I have started to apply what I learned as a teacher to programming. Just like programming, foreign languages are usually taught badly: the idea is to teach grammar and drill vocabulary. The students jam words together using the grammar and eventually learn how to speak. The problem is that most people are not very good at this technique, leading everyone to the conclusion that you need to have some sort of talent for learning languages in order to become fluent at a second language. I have found (like a lot of other teachers) that this is a poor way to teach. It is better to use "comprehensible input" to build fluency. The idea is that if you furnish students with a large amount of input that they can understand, they will acquire language. So instead of breaking up language by category and teaching rules that students apply, you give them language in context that they can understand and have a high amount of repetition. My experience (at high school level) is that the vast majority of my students could reach a surprisingly high level of fluency.

When I went back to programming a couple of years ago, I started mentoring some of the guys on the team who were under performing. Their main problem was that they would not understand what was going on in the code and would resort to "programming by google" (i.e. just cut and paste whatever crap from stack overflow that seemed relevant into the code). I talked with these team members and asked them, "When you read the code, how much of it do you understand perfectly". The answer was "70-80%". I explained the input hypothesis and told them that in order to reach fluency with the code, they would have to understand 95% of everything they read. Or, since it is hard to tell if you understand 95%, they should aim for 100% comprehension. After a few times where they fell back and claimed that it was "impossible" to understand all of the code (and I demonstrated that it was not impossible), they started taking more time to comprehend what was in the code base. Within a few months, their level improved dramatically.

I'm not saying that anyone can be a great programmer. But, most people who are diligent enough to graduate from college can become a half decent programmer. Our team is rather special in that we provide a lot of time and support to allow people to improve. I think the reason most teams can only get good productivity with talented programmers is that they essentially abandon them once they join the team. If you don't have the chops, then you don't deserve to be here. I've actually said that before, to my shame. I now think that most people who are interested in programming can be a programmer if they are taught properly.

In over 20 years as a professional programmer, I have met many, many good programmers. In the same time period, I have met maybe 3 competent program managers (or business analysts, or whatever they call them in your neck of the woods). I'm lucky to be working with a great program manager right now and it is amazing what a difference it makes. I would easily trade half my team for that one person. There will be a lot of people here who have *never* worked with a competent PGM.

If you have people skills, organizational skills, can find a way to not go crazy listening to programmers complain about minutia, and can grasp technical concepts you can be a good PGM. Which probably explains why there aren't very many... Rather than push people who are not interested in techie things to become programmers, why not look for people who are interested in talking to people, listening to problems and organizing things. Train them as PGMs.

I can't really understand what you are talking about. A Calfee frame costs $3000 and weighs 6-7 pounds. My entry level (knock off Asian clone) carbon fiber frame costs $800 and weighs 2.1 pounds.

My entire bike weighs in at 17.5 lbs (I have crap wheels and a heavy seat post). Adding 4 pounds for the frame is nearly a 25% increase in weight. If I was going to spend $3000 on a frame, I would certainly match it with decent wheels and seat post. This would change the weight increase to over 30%.

Bamboo, while cool, is an expensive way to dramatically increase the weight of a bike. Not that I'm a weight weenie... But if I wanted a "heavy" bike, I could get a great aluminium or steel frame and spend the other $2000+ on the rest of the bike. A Caad10 aluminium frame, which is a very decent frame, weighs 2.4 pounds. Top of the line steel frames weigh about the same. Honestly, I can't really tell the difference in weight when riding a bike with a 3 oz heavier frame, but I can definitely tell the difference with a 4 lb heavier frame.

I can see this working very similarly to the free software movement. As you correctly point out, there are already plenty of gardeners who are passionate about seed sharing. The internet allowed free software to be an efficient method of software development and distribution. 30 years on, it has even reached mainstream development. Just look at the percentage of teams using free software development tools (especially in web development).

In the past, it was difficult for an individual (dare I say hobbyist) to develop a useful new variety of plant. You need a lot of time, effort and especially land. But what if you can coordinate with other hobbyists over the internet? What if you all agreed that you would share seed? What if you all agreed that nobody could restrict the future use of these seeds. Now you have many hands, and many small plots of land, and many different growing environments, pollen, etc. Suddenly it scales.

What is needed is coordination and trust. The GPL created a level playing field that allowed people to trust each other when collaborating in software development. I'm not sure, but having a similar agreement for seed development does not sound like a bad idea to me.

Just to clarify. The lawsuit that I'm aware of entailed a farmer using roundup on his field and discovering that some things didn't die. These were volunteers from a neighbouring farmer's field that blew into his. He collected that seed and grew a subsequent crop of roundup resistant plants. While the farmer was not obliged under contract not to replant these seeds, the act of planting was considered patent infringement.

Personally I'm not a fan of the laws that allow this to happen, but probably this was a good legal judgement. It is important to get the fact right, though. I would have no problem with a seed company selling seed under a contract. I have a fairly big problem with the concept that planting a seed is patent infringement. But that's what the law allows right now.

Heartbleed the BUG would still exist, but Hearbleed the EXPLOIT would not exist, had they not been overcome with NIH syndrome for dynamic memory handling.

Random guy here. I may be wrong, but I think you are confusing inflation with deflation. The value of BTC is rising against real goods. So in other words, it costs less in BTC to buy things today than it did last year. This is deflation.

I have been watching Bitcoin with interest to see what it will do. In hindsight, if I were to criticise Bitcoin, I would say that it is too difficult to receive BTC. It is interesting that the very thing that makes it secure has the potential to limit its distribution. As the price of BTC goes up, it becomes more lucrative to mine. This increases interest in mining and encourages people to invest in hardware to mine. This, in turn, increases the difficulty, raising the barrier to entry. So new BTC are likely to remain in a relatively small group of people.

Of course, people can buy BTC, but if they do so speculatively, they may be loath to part with the BTC until they have made a profit. This can further limit the spread of BTC. In other words, you could get into a situation where people holding BTC are largely those who have spent a large amount of money mining it, and those who are speculating on its value. For those who wish to use BTC as a token of exchange for goods and services, it can be difficult/expensive to acquire in any quantity.

I think it would have been better to encourage inflation. In an inflationary system, currency essentially expires. The longer you hold it, the less value it holds. This is an excellent feature because it encourages the use of the currency, allowing it to get into the hands of people who will use it for true growth (i.e., producing something that has tangible value to someone else). If I can not get my hands on currency, or the barrier to entry to getting currency is too difficult, then my potential productivity is wasted. I can't obtain the resources I need to do my work. The currency has failed to do its job.

Obviously this topic is too broad to discuss intelligently in a /. post. However, I would encourage Bitcoin developers to look at modern economics with a more critical eye. I think many people are unwisely discarding a lot of economic theory without really understanding it properly.

No wonder game companies are trying to get let's play videos taken down with DMCA claims.

Every first-past-the-post voting system eventually turns into votes out of fear of the other guy. It's a mathematical certainty.

Maybe not, but at least eSports don't artificially limit the potential performance of participants that don't happen to have the magical combination of freak athleticis genes that conventional sports require to make it big.

He's a contractor. Win, lose, blame, credit; what does it matter to him?

People hire contractors because they have problems that they can't or won't solve themselves. This is the nature of the job. A good contractor, one that gets hired again and again, doesn't panic just because the job is difficult. Even if the job is impossible, he simply says so before he carries on anyway.

Relax. Write code. Get paid. Drink Beer.